ClassiPress v3.1 is Now Available

I’m pleased to finally be able to announce the highly anticipated, long awaited, release of ClassiPress 3.1! This has been a release in the making for many months and is a culmination of countless hours of work from our entire team and our beta testers (thanks guys & gals).

The most notable features in this release include:

Advanced Search

Refine searches within categories

Not all categories have the same type of ads, right? For example, ad listings for cars would be quite different than real estate listings. Not to worry. ClassiPress 3.1 now sports the most advanced WordPress search around. It allows you to create category-specific search modules so your visitors can easily refine their search results.

Each category search module includes a radius (by city or zip code) and price slider for pinpoint accuracy (due to geocoding each ad using the Google Maps API) along with any other category-specific fields you’d like to include.

Facebook Integration

ClassiPress Facebook login & signup integration

Using the Facebook Open Graph API, we’ve built in a nifty Facebook sign-in option to really ‘wow’ your customers.

The regular WordPress registration options still are available so this just adds another convenient way for your visitors to instantly register and sign into your site. No plugins or headaches to deal with. It just works (minimal setup is required).

Membership Packs

Offer membership packs to your customers

In addition to the custom ad packages already included with ClassiPress, you can now setup conditional membership packs.

For example, you can create a 30-day unlimited membership pack where your customers can submit as many ads as they want within the given time period. It’s the “all you can eat” pricing model which many of you have been asking for.

Custom Ad Write Panel

Admins can now easily manage all ads and images.

Administrators now have much better visibility into each ad with the custom ad write panel. The panel neatly organizes all the custom meta fields allowing you to update/change values with ease.

In addition, you can see the uploaded images associated to the ad and also add/remove images without having to visit the media library.

AppThemes API

We’ve also introduced the AppThemes API which enables developers to customize functionality without having to modify the core theme code. There are now over 75 new action hooks throughout ClassiPress (and all our other themes) and we’re excited to see what our community comes up with! We will soon be releasing tutorials and more details on how to use these hooks.

Payment Plugin Support

Offer Google Checkout as a new payment option.

In addition to the 75 new hooks, we’ve included five payment gateway-specific hooks that allow developers to build add-on payment plugins. We’ve already built a Google Checkout ClassiPress plugin (free) that you can install with your existing ClassiPress site.

Download it. Reverse engineer it. Fork it. It’s there for you to use. You will also be able to download the ClassiPress payment gateway plugin template to get started from scratch on other payment gateways. We’re still finishing it up so stay tuned for more details soon.

This opens up a huge opportunity for 3rd-parties looking to sell (or giveaway) ClassiPress plugins so what are you waiting for? Get crackin!

Besides all the new features and fixes, we’ve also made some optimization tweaks to speed up page loads. The list of goodness goes on so continue reading the rest of the fixes and changes all rolled up into 3.1 below.

issue where search auto-complete would not escape html entities (i.e & would be &)

dashboard widgets no longer show move icon when hover on bar

issue where html was allowed to be passed into non-text area fields

added padding left style to embedded ad objects so native videos are centered

added missing css div class around post-block to show white border and match the rest of the blocks

added a min height to the home page tabs section to reduce page jump on tab change

added a show/hide function for the pricing admin option tab to only show relevant fields

new installs will attempt to set permalink structure and then flush rewrite rules instead of manually having to do

bug when image gallery was embedded in blog post and created an error. created new attachment page template to handle it

fixed trackback/pingback section for blog posts so they now properly display

escaped comment fields to improve security

How Can I Get This Version?

Existing customers can login to their customer account and download the latest version.

How Do I Upgrade?

If you haven’t made any changes to the theme files then the easiest method is to just do a complete upgrade (download the full 3.1 version). Then follow the “Upgrade from 3.0.5.x to 3.1” guide. If you’ve made modifications to the core theme files, then it’s going to be a bit harder to upgrade. We still recommend doing a complete upgrade and then use the new API hooks instead of modifying the core theme code. This will make upgrades a cinch in the future.

Questions?

Anything related to support should be posted in the support forum where our dedicated support team can assist you.

What Files Have Changed?

As you are aware, we typically we offer a patch (a .zip of just the modified files) but it doesn’t make much sense this time because almost every file has been modified.

I removed all of the comments code of theme-comments.php to calm this issue but I had thought this appearance or disappearance had previously been controllable by the Dashboard settings either in WP or CP.

At any rate, I NOTICE THAT CLASSIPRESS 3.1 is playing MUCH NICER with 3rd party plugins!!

In particular, I had been frustrated that other custom menu plug-ins could not co-exist with ClassiPress in that to install them created errors with the classipress theme.

Congratulations David and the team effort. ClassiPress now beginning to become much more interesting. Is that David could post a video showing and explaining how to do it and configures the advanced search? It does not seem that difficult, but I would avoid users to wrap their heads and support staff to get questions answered over and over.

Hope someone creates a payment option so that Dutch payments like iDeal can be used! Maybe Moneybookers is the best option, because it offers many different local payment options world wide. Google Checkout is only used in US and UK…

Yeah i really need iDeal! There are a few iDeal plugins out there for shopping themes , shouldnt be hard to modify it for CP use.
Love the update, especially the adview in the admin area , really nice surprise !

@David and the rest of the AppThemes team members = Thank you for the obvious very hard work put into CP over the last months. I wish you all the best success. I am very excited about the greatly improved features / functionality and look forward to using this fine product in the not too distant future.

I’m trying to research the forum before I decide to buy this product. I already created an account, but still, I cannot see the answers to some questions already posted that are exactly what I need to know.
Plus there’s no direct email to ask. So I don’t know what to do. You shouldn’t buy the application without knowing if it covers your needs…
Hope the owners read this

God bless you! I’ve been trying to find solutions to some of these things for hours and just happened to check to see if there were any updates and boom! All the issues I wanted resolved are done so here. Thanks so much.

Quick question (Sorry if this should be in the forums). I would like to launch a multi-country type ads site. Would it be best to go the multi-site route for say 3 countries. The reason I ask this here is I would like to get your quick view David as you know the roadmap of classipress better than anyone. If I go multi-site, I will get the ability to change language, currency, prices, per country. However in a future build of 3.2 or 3.3 will a true multi-country solution be on the cards with currency,language, categories all per country? Or is it just the best thing to go multi-site for this to get a true tailored site per country? Again just a quick heads up on this – as I dont want to go multi-site and then the next build to have all these features

@Jamesweb, we don’t plan on having a multi-country solution but rather a multi-region one. Based on customer feedback, most deal only within their country. So a multi-site solution would be your best setup in this case.

Good to know david, I agree the stronger the multi-region site gets the better to be honest. I would love to see rating of users and also some way to stamp the approval of regular users. That would be a great addition. Keep up the strong work.

@kedey.com You can find further details on how to set up the refine search function here in the official documentation, but if you require any further help, please do post a thread in the support forums and we’ll be happy to assist further. Thanks.

@cutes, we’ve setup ClassiPress so it’s easy for developers to write their own payment gateway plugins. We’ve found this to be a more beneficial method than AppThemes building the payment gateway plugins. You can find a tutorial on our docs site.